When you are hungry, you are not alone. When you are sick, you are not alone, either. The human body is home for tens of trillions of microbes, the most populated residence being the distal gut. Thanks to high-throughput metagenomic sequencing techniques, we do not have to coax each of them to grow on a plate or in a flask, in order to know who the bugs are and what genes they have. From just 1 gram of one's feces, there is plenty of genomic information for our gut microbial community, referred to as the gut microbiome.

*ORFs: open reading frame*N50: it is the length for which the collection of all contigs of that length or longer contains at least half of the total of the lengths of the contigs*N90: it is the length for which the collection of all contigs of that length or longer contains at least 90% of the total of the lengths of the contigs*KO: KEGG orthologue group*eggNOG (evolutionary genealogy of genes: Non-supervised Orthologous Groups)See our paper for details.